As part of the Meadows School of the Art’s New York Colloquium, undergraduate and graduate students are visiting a range of museums, galleries, artists’ studios and other venues during winter break 2012.

A new appreciation for art and its messages

An update from Lucy, a first-year President’s Scholar and member of the University Honors Program who plans to major in civil engineering in the Lyle School:

Abi and Lucy inside a sculpture at a New York gallery

As we wrap up our time in New York, I am amazed at all that we have done in just two weeks. We’ve seen all kinds of art, from the medieval collections at The Cloisters to the mysterious Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seed installation. I especially loved MoMA PS1’s September 11 exhibit and the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s exhibit of Kymia Nawabi’s “Not for Long, My Forlorn.”

We tasted the best of New York in Little Italy, Chinatown, SoHo, Chelsea, and the Upper West Side (our “home away from home”). We visited neat bookstores and conversed with locals at galleries and at Café Lalo, where part of the movie You’ve Got Mail was filmed. We saw Faust at the Met Opera, and we also saw Anything Goes, Avenue Q, and Relatively Speaking.

Between all the madness that is New York, I’ve tried to find time to journal about my experiences and make sense of the art that we’ve seen that is harder to grasp. I have developed a better understanding of contemporary art and learned that it makes all the difference to know about the artist’s background and inspirations in creating work. I leave New York with an appreciation for the powerful messages that artists incorporate into their work and a thirst for more of certain artists’ work, including Ai Weiwei, On Kawara, and Jasper Johns.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to experience New York like this, and I can’t wait to share more of my experiences with my friends and family!